by Alex Bledsoe
Of course, Kell’s absence wasn’t his own fault. He’d been stabbed by Dwayne Gitterman, his sister Bronwyn’s old boyfriend. And Bronwyn had exacted revenge for herself, her family, and the Tufa. Bronwyn had even named her daughter Kell, in honor of her big brother. So in most ways, the case was closed. Everything had been settled years ago.
But not in Aiden’s heart.
He didn’t even feel the tears start, and didn’t notice them until they reached his lips. His playing began to falter as sobs, locked away for fear they might embarrass him, began to break free.
He listened through the music, hoping to hear his brother’s voice, the one that had teased and tormented and reassured him as a child. But there was only the melody, now a stuttering thing that sounded as raw and ragged as he felt. At last he stopped, sat down on the ground, and cried harder than he had since he was a small boy.
Then he felt fingers tousle his hair.
He looked up, but no one was around. He jumped to his feet.
He recognized that touch. It was the aggravating, infuriating way Kell used to condescend to him when Aiden was being annoying. He’d grown to hate that touch, and everything it implied about being the baby brother.
The winds sighed in the trees above him, and a gentler breeze blew against his face. Had it been merely the wind?
It didn’t matter. Whatever its source, the brief touch had somehow calmed his heart. He breathed normally, and wiped his nose with his forearm.
He began to play again, the same song but in a more upbeat, positive way. The winds grew louder overhead, as if in approval.
27
Bliss Overbay cried out, uninhibited and wild with abandon, arching her back as she straddled Jack Cates in their bed. He also finished a moment later, hands around her slender waist, pulling her down atop him to get as deep as possible. Then, with a mutual sigh of mingled satisfaction and exhaustion, they relaxed.
Without climbing off him, Bliss reached for the bottle of ice water on the bedside table. “Glad you were here when I got home,” she gasped between drinks.
“Me, too,” he said, pushing his sweaty hair from his eyes.
She chuckled and held the bottle to his lips. He drank a long swallow. Then, biting her lip lasciviously, she poured some water onto her breasts, shivering as it trickled down to pool between them.
He sat up and licked the trailing droplets. She quivered with delight.
Then he fell back with a chuckle. “Is this ever going to get boring and routine?”
She crawled off and stretched out beside him. Her hand rested on the skin below his navel. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
He slid his arm under her neck and pulled her close. “That must’ve been some meeting you went to tonight.”
She laughed. “The meeting had nothing to do with it,” she said, but of course that was a lie. The whole way home, all she could think about was that a time might come when Jack wouldn’t be there, when she couldn’t touch him or kiss him or take him in her mouth or feel him fill her. So when she got home and saw his work truck in her driveway, she’d jumped him before he could even say hello. He hadn’t put up much of a fight.
“Well, whatever the reason, that was fantastic,” he said. She marveled again at how such a strong, masculine, normally taciturn man opened up to her when they were alone; he was totally unafraid to show his emotions, and cared as much for her responses as she did for his. Could she really walk away from this?
“So,” he said, “what was the meeting about?”
“Just Tufa stuff.”
“Big Tufa stuff?”
Oh, brother. “Maybe.”
He shifted to look into her eyes. “I get the sense that you want to tell me more.”
“I do.”
“But you can’t?”
“Not … yet.” Jack, like Bronwyn’s husband, knew the truth about the Tufa, but unlike Craig Chess, he didn’t understand how the society operated. Bliss knew that as a law enforcement officer, Jack needed to treat everyone the same, and if he knew more of their secrets, he’d leave himself open to favoritism. After all, how can you write a ticket for not having a fishing license to someone who could reveal their wings and fly away?
“You know I can keep a secret,” he pointed out.
“I know you can, honey. But I’m still figuring out how I feel about it, and I need to do that before I share it.”
“Okay. But I’m here when you’re ready.”
She rolled onto her side and kissed him. “I know you are.”
“And I always will be,” he said with the kind of certainty that only comes when you don’t know all the details.
She kissed him again, then giggled. “Well, that was fast,” she said, her hand dropping lower. “Especially for a guy your age.”
“I’m inspired,” he said, and rolled over on top of her.
Later, after Jack had fallen asleep, Bliss walked naked out the back door and down the stone path to the little dock that protruded into her small lake. The thing that lived in the water, sensing her presence, let its broad finless back breach the surface before sliding down into the blackness that was deeper than any non-Tufa could imagine. Overhead the moonless night was clear, showing the belt of the Milky Way across the sky. There was no night wind.
“Oh, man,” she said quietly, pushing her sweat-matted hair out of her face. “What the hell do I do?”
She waited to see if anyone would come. Sometimes Mandalay dropped out of the sky, summoned by her majordomo’s uncertainty about something. But on this windless night, there was nothing. Bliss was naked and alone.
She sat down at the end of the dock, careful to avoid splinters, and dangled her feet in the water. The thing that lived there slid under them, letting her feet slide along its smooth, scaleless back. She was the only one who knew of it, the one who’d given it a safe place and watched it grow there until it could live nowhere else.
If she left, what would become of it, trapped and alone? Would Jack come and feed it, or would he kill it for the common good, the way he occasionally had to kill bears who grew too accustomed to a human presence? Would he simply refuse to believe it existed?
She lay back on the dock and stared up at the sky. The stars of home were different, a cosmos as removed from this world as the surface of a distant planet. Yet, if Azure was right, they were still connected to it through this world. She knew the mountains around her and the mountains of their home had once been part of the same range, before the continents drifted apart; a tunnel through them, suffused with the Queen’s magic, might still remain connected. There was no way to know except by finding it, and going through.
She remembered the day Radella, daughter of the Tall Woman, had been born, her mother dying on animal skins soaked with blood. It had begun a tradition that was as cruel as it was essential: Radella had in turn died giving birth to her first daughter, and so on up to the death of Mandalay’s mother.
She recalled the way Radella grew up in their village, and the wonder they all felt when they realized she had not only her own memories, but that of her mother as well. And with each generation those memories grew, until now there was a fifteen-year-old girl who could remember when the mountains around them were as tall as the Alps. Yet each generation also brought its own personality, some eager for the responsibility and some far less so, adding emotional wisdom to accumulated history.
And now the latest, Mandalay, faced a bigger decision than her whole line of ancestors had faced since that day.
And Bliss herself? She’d slid through time, never growing older, never truly connecting with anyone because of her duty to protect, guide, and ultimately serve the next young woman in Radella’s line. Her glamour kept her secret, kept any non-Tufa people from noticing that she never changed, that she’d been there from the beginning.
But she had changed. She loved Jack with a ferocity that only eons of self-denial could unleash. He was a simple man, really; not stupid by any means,
but not eaten up with anxiety or self-doubt. And that didn’t matter; he was hers, and she loved him, and she’d hang on to him as long as she could.
Unless, of course, she returned home with the other Tufa.
“Fuck,” she said, drawing out the word, draping her arm across her eyes. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Your fly’s open,” a new voice said.
Without getting up, Bliss twisted to look behind her. “Hey. What are you doing here?”
“Hey,” Curnen Overbay said to her big sister. She wore a sundress, hiking boots, and a leather jacket, and looked like any trendy undergraduate. The fact that she’d spent fifty feral years roaming the woods like some animal, and had barely avoided a curse that would’ve erased her from the world’s memory as thoroughly as Sadieville, left no visible trace. She was calm now, and relaxed, and only a deep look into her eyes revealed the scars her experience had left. “How’s the water horse?”
“Restless,” Bliss said.
“Me, too,” Curnen said. “I got the feeling something was going on.” She stepped out of her boots and sat down beside Bliss, putting her feet in the water. “Something big. Am I right?”
“You are. Do you want to know what?”
“I do.” She frowned. “Or do I?”
“You can’t unlearn it.”
“That’s always the way.” After a moment of silence, she added, “So tell me already.”
“I have to sing you a song.” And she did, softly repeating the tune Azure had sung to them.
When she finished, Curnen drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. “Wow,” she said softly. “I never saw that coming.”
“None of us did.”
“Are you going to go? I mean, you remember it. You lived there. I only have your stories to go by.”
“I don’t know. A lot’s happened. There’s some pretty compelling reasons to stay.”
“If you go, who gets the tapestry?”
In the cellar beneath Bliss’s house, untouched by the fire that destroyed the original home four years earlier, was a secret room where a special tapestry hung. It had been woven during the first years of the Tufa exile, and depicted the moment of their leader’s supreme failure. The Overbay family had protected it ever since, even before they took the name Overbay.
“I assume,” Bliss said, “that we’d take it with us.”
“If you go.”
“If I go. If I can go. What about you?”
“Oh, I can’t. Rob and I have two kids.”
Bliss sat up. “What? Already?”
She shrugged, and gave her sister a little smile. “What can I say? We like to fuck, and I’ve always wanted kids. You should see them: a four-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy. They’re already musical.”
“You’re damn right I should see them. Why haven’t you sent me any pictures? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know, I just … lose track of time,” she said with a shrug. They both laughed.
“So you wouldn’t bring the kids? They’re half-bloods, they’d do fine.”
“No. I’m happy where I am. Rob teaches at a college and plays in a band on the weekends. The kids and I catch every show we can, and I’ve got my own studio where I paint.” She held up her hand, spattered with tiny drops of different colors. “I can’t imagine a better life, even there.”
Bliss lay back and again stared up at the stars. “I can,” she said quietly.
Curnen lay down beside her, their shoulders touching. “Then don’t tell me,” she said quietly. And she held her big sister’s hand while Bliss cried.
* * *
“So what will we do?” Thorn Parrish asked her parents. Her mother and father said nothing.
Thorn sighed in annoyance. She’d just returned from six months in New York City, living with Cyrus “C.C.” Crow’s boyfriend Matt Johanssen and singularly failing to make a dent in the music scene. Now she was back home and trying desperately to get Janet Harper, a girl three years her junior, to let her join her group, Little Trouble Girls. Her pride was severely battered, so the thought of simply leaving this world had an undeniable appeal.
Ladonna Parrish finally said, “I don’t see us going back. We’ve got our place here. We’ve got our world.”
“I don’t have this world,” Thorn said. “This world has pretty thoroughly kicked my ass.”
“Oh, settle down,” Gerald Parrish said. He recalled the tales he’d heard of the place, and that he’d passed on to his children as bedtime stories. That’s how they felt to him now, too; whatever reality they embodied paled beside the tangible world around him, the one he understood. “You’re just pissed off because it didn’t work out up north.”
“So? People have relocated for worse reasons. And what if it didn’t work because I’m supposed to go back?”
“It ain’t just relocating,” Ladonna said. “You go back, that’s it. You stay there, you follow their rules, and you act like you like it. No trying out new things, no finding true love or being a big success in the music world. There, everyone’s a great picker.”
“But everyone’s happy, too,” Thorn insisted. “Isn’t that right?” She thought of the line from the spoken intro of “Let’s Go Crazy”: a world of never-ending happiness.
“But when everyone’s happy, is anybody really happy?” Gerald said. “Don’t you need the unhappiness so you’ve got something to compare it to?”
“Oh, come on, that’s just wordplay,” Thorn said.
“Well, it’s how I feel,” her father said.
“What about all the sadness? The fear? You can’t want that. You can’t want Rayford to have died.”
“Thorn!” Ladonna scolded.
Thorn’s big brother Ray had also left for New York, and thoroughly conquered it with his now-famous musical Chapel of Ease, even if he did die tragically just before the premiere. Ray would understand her desire to leave this world, to find a place where everything wasn’t such a goddamned struggle.
At any other time, Gerald would’ve reacted with anger, but tonight he just shook his head. “You know what? I’d rather live in a world with sadness and fear, because then I’d really know when I was happy.”
“If you ever were,” Thorn fired back, but it was weak and she knew it.
“Thorn Parrish, you apologize to your father right now,” Ladonna said.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she mumbled.
“And we’ll decide as a family whether to go or not, if there’s ever a real chance.”
“I’m a full-grown woman,” Thorn said. “I make my own decisions.” But her cowed tone belied the defiance in her words. She left them, slamming her room’s door the way she’d done as a teenager.
“That girl,” Ladonna said, and shook her head.
“Maybe she’s right,” Gerald said.
28
Ginny Vipperman passed the joint to her best friend Janet Harper. They sat on a picnic table at a scenic overlook that gave them a panoramic view of the Needsville valley below, and the cloudless star-filled sky above. The two girls, both just turned eighteen, were already thoroughly stoned, and their conversation moved with the sluggish certainty their minds were used to.
“You going to let Thorn Parrish join the band, then?” Ginny asked. She opened the can of Pringles she’d brought.
“I don’t know,” Janet said, taking an offered chip. “She writes her own songs, and this band already has a songwriter. I ain’t interested in us being Fleetwood Mac.”
“But she’s worked in New York,” Ginny said as she chewed. “She might be useful.”
“Then she should be our manager, not another guitarist.”
“Well, I like her,” Ginny said. They passed the joint another time, and Ginny added, “Wow. Going back home. For real.”
“For real,” Janet said tightly around the smoke she held in her lungs.
“I wonder what the boys there are like?” Ginny asked. “Are they all kind of…” She made a flut
tering, flighty hand gesture.
“What the hell does that mean?” Janet asked. “You asking if they’re all gay?”
“No, not gay, just … not overtly masculine. Sissies, but not in a gay way. I mean, look at all the art. Even the painting over in the Cricket library.”
That painting, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, had been painted in an insane asylum by a man who’d killed his father. It was considered by most to be the delusional imagination of a damaged mind. Only the Tufa knew that Richard Dadd’s insanity had allowed him to glimpse, and maybe even visit, the Tufa homeland at the exact moment before the Tufa were exiled. The original painting now sat quietly on the back end of a standing bookshelf in the Cricket library, exactly as it had been for 150 years, except for the vandalism committed by Bo-Kate Wisby four years earlier. She’d scratched away the face of the Fairy Feller, which resembled that of the late Rockhouse Hicks, and no one had made any attempt to restore it. Bringing back the image might accidentally bring back Rockhouse, and no one wanted that.
But Ginny was right, the people as depicted in that painting were not exactly paragons of masculine virtue. And Ginny liked boys. Janet, on the other hand, had no particular interest in either the opposite or the same sex, and was content to turn all her energies toward her music. It was one reason their friendship had endured; they didn’t compete over anything.
“Are the kind of boys there important?” Janet asked.
“They are to me. I like it.” She blew a smoke ring and smiled. “I like it a lot.”
Janet was too fuzzed to take offense. “They say the music is in the air itself,” she said dreamily. “Can you imagine that? Just walking along and passing through songs and melodies, feeling them blow around you like a summer breeze?”
“No,” Ginny said honestly.
“I can. It sounds amazing.”
“So you’d go?”